


Do Prophets Lie

by vacantseats



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-06 01:30:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5397800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vacantseats/pseuds/vacantseats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Blue Sargent had already been small enough to begin with. Now it was just alarming."</p><p>Cabeswater de-ages the gang one by one. Everyone learns a lot about everyone else. Blue has no front teeth. Ronan has curly hair. Gansey can't see without glasses. Adam thinks he can talk to dogs.</p><p>It's better and stranger than it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do Prophets Lie

Blue was pretty much used to being the shortest person in the room, but never quite this short comparatively.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, looking up—even further up than usual—at the three boys all staring down at her in vaguely confused horror.

She had a lisp on account of her two missing front teeth. Calla said that to have two front teeth missing at the same time meant something great was coming to you soon though, so she didn’t really mind it.

“Uhm,” the boy to her left said. “G-Gansey?”

It was a pretty funny word. She laughed at it. “Gan-see?” she repeated. “Gansey. Gaaan-seeeeeee.”

“Er,” the boy to her right said. “Hi.”

“Who are you guys?” she asked, frowning briefly. She wasn’t really sure how she'd gotten there. It looked like the forest out back of her house, maybe, only she wasn’t supposed to be out there without Orla. Oh man. Orla was going to be in so much trouble when she got back!

“Er,” the boy to her right said again, ”I’m, uh. I’m Gansey.”

“You’re a _what_?” she asked. What a weird thing to call a person. But then she remembered what her mom always told her— _some people might think your name is weird too, honey, so you can’t make fun of others’. That’s just inviting bad karma_.

She couldn’t help it though, she had to laugh, so she clapped her hands over her mouth to do so in private. She thought maybe he could still tell, anyway—the Gansey person.

“Er,” the Gansey repeated. “Blue. I think we need to get you home.”

That…was a little weird, honestly. How did he know her name? She stopped laughing. 

“Who are you guys, anyway?” she asked suspiciously, peering at the other two boys.

“Blue, it’s alright,” the one to her left said, and took a step towards her.

He probably didn’t mean anything by it. Actually, he was maybe trying to be nice…comforting even. Still, Blue remembered exactly what Calla told her to do if she ever felt weird around strangers.

She turned around and _sprinted_.

The three boys didn’t even realize what had happened until they were left standing alone in the small clearing, listening to the fading sound of her bare feet hitting dirt. 

“Well,” the one who’d previously been silent said. “Fuck.”

 

*****

 

Blue Sargent had already been small enough to begin with. Now it was just alarming.

Or, it would be alarming again _. If they could fucking find her_.

“MAGGOT!” Ronan shouted at the top of his lungs, cupping his hands over his mouth. “MAGGOT COME BACK!”

“She doesn’t know that you call her Maggot,” Adam said, repeating himself for the third time this afternoon.

“Well she didn’t really respond well to you two just knowing her name out of nowhere,” Ronan huffed at him. 

Sometimes he couldn’t fucking stand Adam Parrish.

Sometimes he couldn’t remember how they’d even become friends in the first place.

(One of those things was probably a lie.)

“BLUE!” Gansey yelled now, considerably more quiet than Ronan. It was almost funny, that even in times of monumental crisis Dick Gansey still tried to yell at an appropriate volume.

“She’s not just going to come out because we’re screaming her name at her,” Adam said, ever helpful.

“Then what the fuck do you want us to do, Parrish?” Ronan snapped, wheeling around to face him. Adam’s expression suggested he had expected him to do that, and he wasn’t impressed by Ronan’s predictability.

“We should go back to the clearing and wait for her,” Adam said. “Eventually she’ll figure that she can’t get out of here either and come back.” 

They were sort of stuck in Cabeswater. Well, just a little square of Cabeswater that was about a mile long in each direction. It had taken them nearly an hour of walking in circles to realize that they just kept ending up in the same little plot of land, but before they’d gotten a chance to do anything about it, Sargent had…gotten smaller. About two-and-a-half feet smaller, if he had to guess.

“Fine,” Ronan grated out, and walked straight past Adam without pausing to see if he or Gansey would follow. This whole thing was shitty.

They’d come to Cabeswater to see his mom because Adam’d had a theory about redirecting the ley line or something. He hadn’t really been clear on the subject.

It was supposed to be just the two of them going, but then Gansey’d come back to Monmouth early and caught them leaving. Then he’d suggested they bring Sargent along, and then Aurora hadn’t even been in Cabeswater when they got there, and now Sargent was five, Cabeswater had locked them in a loop, and Parrish was being a fucking. Smug. Asshole.

He wasn’t, really. He was just doing that annoying thing where he managed to stay totally calm in a situation that demanded at least mild panic.

Ronan wasn’t panicking. The branches and rocks he was kicking just kept getting in his way.

He wasn’t panicked about Sargent, at least. He knew she was capable enough that even the five-year-old version of herself could probably survive in a magical forest for days on end. She’d been smart enough to run from strangers, after all, which was more than he could probably say for himself at that age.

It was weird that his mom had been missing, though. It wasn’t exactly like she could just _leave whenever she wanted_.

“BLUE!” Gansey called out again from somewhere a little bit further behind him. Still quiet enough that if mini Sargent was still around, she probably wouldn’t even hear him.

“He’s yelling pretty quietly for someone looking for a lost child,” Adam said, suddenly catching up with him.

He was stuck between the immediate urge to laugh in agreement, and the secondary reaction of annoyance that Adam could guess what he was thinking.

They walked in silence for a moment before Ronan added, “Maybe he doesn’t want to find her.”

“Dark,” Adam said. 

“I don’t think he likes children all that much,” Ronan pointed out.

“I like children fine,” Gansey called, having caught up with them.

“At a distance, maybe,” Ronan said, then sped up a bit so that he was ahead of the other two again. This was not what he’d wanted to do with his Saturday.

“You know we’ll find her,” Adam called to him, his voice kept purposely casual. He didn’t mean Blue. 

Ronan was as thankful for the reassurance as he was annoyed that Adam had even brought it up.

“Whatever,” he muttered, even though Adam couldn’t hear it from that distance. 

“She can’t have gotten that far,” Gansey said, ever reasonably unaware of the different conversational layers at play.

“Definitely not,” Ronan said loudly so they could hear him. “Her legs are fucking stumpy.”

“THEY ARE NOT!” the unmistakeable high-pitched shrill of Blue Sargent’s voice sounded down to them from above.

The three boys looked up to find the even tinier version of their tiny best friend hanging from a tree branch.

“How—how did you get up there?!” Gansey asked, flummoxed. 

“I climbed,” she said, her tone of voice suggesting an unspoken _duh_. 

“Well why are you hanging off of it?” Ronan asked, frowning.

“I slipped,” she said. “Catch me!”

That was the only warning he got before she dropped onto him. His arms wrapped around her instinctively, cradling her close to his chest, but he hadn’t had time to lock his legs in place, so the two crashed rather violently to the forest floor.

“Ouch!” Sargent yelled in his face, once she’d gotten over the daze from the fall. Only she had a lisp so it sounded more like 'Outsth.'

“You’re a bad catcher.”                                                          

“You’re a bad tree climber,” he countered, rubbing his knee where it’d collided painfully with a rock.

“Am not, I meant to do that,” she insisted, swatting at Gansey’s hands as he attempted to help her up and getting to her feet herself. Her feet were absolutely filthy—she’d left her shoes in the clearing. Her elbow was skinned, though not bleeding, and her hair was wildly tangled.

“You’re dirty,” she told Ronan, pointing at where his pants were now scuffed with dirt from the fall the two of them had caused. 

He fixed her with as heavy of a glare as he could manage. It worked on nearly every teenager and adult he’d ever met, but for some reason five year old Blue Sargent was utterly unfazed.

“So I’m not supposed to talk to strangers, but you three are the only ones here,” she confided blithely.

“We’re not exactly strangers, Blue,” Adam tried, but she fixed him with an outright scowl and stepped back.

“Why do you guys know my name?” she asked.

“Blue,” Gansey said, frowning as he clearly tried to work through how to explain ‘this magical forest zapped you twelve years into the past for reasons heretofore unknown.’

“We’re from the future,” Ronan cut in before Gansey could make whatever misguided attempt he’d been thinking of.

Blue frowned at him and tilted her head to the side. “Oh. Well why didn’t you just say so?”

“You’re a weird one, Maggot,” he told her solemnly, but she just smiled.

“Maggot? Like a bug?” she asked, and smiled wider. “I love bugs! They’re awesome!”

Of course Sargent had been a bug-kid. Jesus. Though he supposed it was better than her being a horse-girl. He’d bet anything that Orla’d been a horse-girl.

Before any of them had a chance to reply, though, an ominous clap of thunder sounded overhead. The sky grew alarmingly dark as they were watching.

“What the hell?” Adam muttered.

“You shouldn’t swear,” Blue informed him, though she hadn’t commented on Ronan’s own use of the word ‘fucking,’ earlier.

Rain started to come down like a fucking hurricane.

“What the hell?” Ronan repeated after Adam.

“There was a cave by the clearing,” Adam had to shout to be heard. “I think we’re pretty close to it now.

“Let’s go!” Gansey yelled, and Ronan swept Sargent up onto his back.

“I can run myself!” she yelled directly into his ear.

“You’re not wearing shoes,” he yelled back, as he sprinted after Adam.

The ground was growing slick with mud, and it was difficult not to trip over loose branches and rocks that weren’t quite visible with the rain. 

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Gansey shouted, finally loud for once. 

“I DON’T KNOW,” Ronan tried to shout back, but before he could get all the words out, he tripped.

He and Sargent went down hard, careening into a cluster of bushes, and then rolling down the hill that had been hidden behind them. Ronan pulled his elbows into his sides and tried desperately not to accidentally hit the five-year-old girl rolling next to him.

“AHHHHHH!” Blue Sargent screamed. It sounded like she was enjoying this.

Ronan made a vague attempt at digging his hands into the mud to stop his trajectory, but this only made him roll at a diagonal. There was mud in his eyes now, so he didn’t even see the giant rock at the bottom of the hill that effectively ended his journey and knocked him out.

 

*****

 

Blue Sargent felt weirdly out of sorts, and slightly too big for her body. It was an indescribably odd feeling, sort of like someone had put a set of skin over her that was too tight.

Plus, she was covered in mud.

“Jesus,” Adam Parrish hissed directly in her face. “Are you ok?” 

“I’m—“ she managed to get out, before leaning forward and vomiting directly next to his shoes. Not on them, which personally she thought was pretty nice of her.

“Oh,” he said, only looking mildly put off. It took kind of a lot to faze Adam Parrish, she had learned.

“God, Jane,” Gansey said, jogging up to the two of them. He was soaking wet and also covered in mud. As was Adam, she realized. What the hell was going on?

 “Good to have you back with us,” Gansey told her. “But where’d Ronan go?”

“Back with you?” she murmured, uncomprehendingly. She looked around her. Something about this forest looked weirdly familiar. It jogged something in her memory from long ago.

“I’ve been here before,” she said slowly.

“Well, yes,” Gansey said. “It’s Cabeswater.”

“What happened?” she asked. 

The two boys exchanged a look that immediately annoyed her. She hated it when they knew something she didn’t. It felt like an automatic currency she would never have enough of.

“You sort of,” Adam began and the same time Gansey tried, “There was a….”

“ _What_?” she asked exhasperated.

Adam paused, and then said all in one go, “Cabeswaterturnedyouintoakidandyouranawayfromus.”

She blinked up at him. 

“ _What_?”

“Er, something happened with Cabeswater, and you kind of…uhm, well, you turned into a little kid, Jane,” Gansey tried.

“Oh.” That was all that she could manage for now. Okay. Weird. Not necessarily the weirdest thing that could have happened to her, but still pretty weird. “And where’d Ronan go?”

Gansey blinked back at her. “You took that well.”

“Stranger things have happened,” she said, waving her hand vaguely.

“Have they, though?” Adam asked dubiously. She didn’t give him a direct response.

“Where’s Lynch? 6-foot-something? Pale? Always followed by a bird named after a grizzly murder weapon? Remember, our other friend who doesn’t happen to be dead?” she asked.

“Well, he was with you,” Gansey said. “There was a…storm, and he put you on his back. We were trying to get to a cave.”

“Then why am I at the bottom of a hill?”

“He tripped,” Adam said.

“Huh,” she frowned. At least that explained all the mud. But where was Ronan, then?

At that moment, all three of them heard a loud sniff coming from the direction of a gnarled looking tree a few feet ahead of them.

They all exchanged a quick glance, and then Blue pushed herself woozily to her feet. Her head spun for a moment, but then the world righted itself underneath her. Slowly, she and the other two inched towards the tree.

“Let’s not startle him,” Adam whispered. “We don’t want him to run away, too.”

“So we’re just going to pop up from behind a tree?” Blue whispered back. “Yeah, that’s not terrifying at all.” 

She looked back at the tree, then motioned for the other two boys to stop.

“Uh,” she called out, “Ronan?”

Another loud sniff came from behind the tree, and then a small boy with wildly curly hair poked his head around to look at them.

It was undeniably Ronan Lynch.

Blue bit her lip and tried her damnedest not to laugh. She had never seen pictures of Ronan Lynch as a kid, and now she knew why. He was pretty funny looking. The ridiculous hair, the giant ears. The _freckles_. He was adorable in a way that older Ronan Lynch vehemently eschewed.

He was also crying, which was another thing older Ronan Lynch vehemently eschewed.

“Hey, Ronan,” Gansey said in what he probably thought was a comforting tone of voice. Really, he just sounded a bit less excessively formal than usual. “It’s okay—“

“I WANNA TAKE A NAP!” Ronan yelled, cutting him off.

Blue exchanged a slightly bewildered glance with Adam. That was…an unexpected reaction, to say the least.

“Uh, okay,” Adam said slowly. “I guess…there’s a cave right up this hill?”

 “I DON’T WANNA NAP IN A CAVE!” Ronan Lynch yelled, stubborn as ever.

“There’s not really anywhere else to nap…” Gansey said slowly. “We’re kind of stuck in this forest.”

Five-year-old Ronan let out an exasperated noise that mostly sounded like “EUGHAH!”

Still, he got to his feet and began to stumble up the hill.

“Er, let me help you,” Gansey said, reaching for him, but Ronan scowled.

“I can do it myself!”

Adam shot Blue a withering glance.

“Was I like that?” She asked, frowning as they began to follow Ronan up towards the cave.

Adam smirked. “Less crying, but yeah.”

“What a weird day,” she muttered, feeling suddenly exhausted.

“It’s not over yet,” Adam sighed.

 

*****

 

“HEY!!!! WAKE UP!!!” 

Gansey sat straight up before his eyes were even open, more because of an instinctual reaction to the high-pitched screaming inches from his face than anything else. Unfortunately, in doing so collided heads with the 5-year-old version of his best friend who had decided that this was the best way to go about waking people from their naps. Ronan scrambled away from Gansey, clutching his forehead and wailing at the top of his lungs. It was a rather alarming thing to wake up to, and Gansey had woken up to some pretty alarming scenes after living with Ronan Lynch for a few years. The adult Ronan Lynch, that is. Who never quite _wailed_.

“What the hell’s going on?” Blue yelled over Ronan’s screams, scrambling up from where she’d been sleeping. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He screamed in my face!” Gansey said hotly, rubbing at his own head gingerly. Then, in response to the venomous look Blue threw him: “I didn’t do it on purpose!”

“HE DID DO IT ON PURPOSE!” Mini-Ronan wailed at Blue through his tears.

“No I didn’t!” Gansey protested, a little panicked. It really was quite disconcerting to almost give the 5-year-old version of your best friend a concussion and then have him yell at you about it.

Mini-Ronan just screamed again at the top of his lungs and threw himself into Blue’s arms. Blue looked kind of startled, but she gingerly patted him on the back and said, “He didn’t mean to, Ronan.”

Mini-Ronan wailed something unintelligible though, and doubled down on his efforts, sliding out of Blue’s arms and onto the floor of the cave where he proceeded to beat his fists against the ground. 

“Oh for god’s sake,” Blue sighed.

“Blue,” Adam says, speaking up from the corner of the cave he has yet to move from, as though getting close to mini-Ronan will be bad for his health, “Do something.”

“Do what?” Blue snapped.

“I don’t know…hug him again?”

“He’s throwing a tantrum,” Blue said. As if to back her up, Ronan started to scream twice as loud. 

“You have siblings! Sort of! Haven’t one of them ever thrown a tantrum?” Gansey added, having to shout to be heard above Ronan now.

The look Blue gave him back is absolutely murderous. “No, they haven’t actually! Not like this! And just because they live in my house doesn’t mean I’m their mother! Why don’t you try something?”

Gansey paused for a moment, but then slowly crawled nearer to Ronan. “Er, Ronan?” He only got a scream in response, and was left to shout again. “I DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT YOU!”

“YOU’RE A JERK!” Ronan screamed, and rolls onto his back now. His face is bright red and streaked with tears.

Gansey couldn’t help but roll his eyes at how ridiculous this all was becoming. Blue caught it and swatted him on the shoulder. “Apologize to him!”

“ _He_ screamed in my face!” Gansey pointed out. He meant it more as a defense for himself than an accusation at Ronan, but it still prompted Ronan to let out another long “AHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

“Gansey, he’s five,” Adam pointed out sensibly. And Gansey couldn’t really think of anything to say in response to that.

“Ronan?” he sort of asked, but he wasn’t not even sure the kid could hear him. “RONAN!” he tried again, “I AM SORRY FOR HITTING YOUR HEAD WITH MY HEAD!”

This was ridiculous.

But of course it worked. Like magic, actually. Mini-Ronan stopped crying and sat up, fixing Gansey with a beseeching look. “Jerk,” he said again, and then actually _stuck out his tongue_.

Gansey was flummoxed. People usually did not hate him on instinct alone. Even Blue had waited until he’d opened his mouth before becoming mildly disdainful towards him. He also didn’t really have that much experience with getting 5 year olds to trust him again after accidentally colliding heads.

He did, however, have a lot of experience with Ronan Lynch. So he stuck out his tongue right back.

It was a ridiculous gesture, but one he was willing to bet Ronan would understand. He was right; mini-Ronan _giggled_ , a sound that was seldom emitted from his older doppleganger, and then rubbed his hand over his forehead.

“Can we go exploring again?” Ronan asked, sounding decently more cheery than he had literally thirty seconds ago. It was a fast switch, but one that the older version of Ronan often made as well.

“Sure,” Blue answered, stretching her arms out behind her. “Just give us a second.”

“I wanna go now!” Ronan demanded, pouting at them all again. It was—so. So odd. So disconcerting to see the five year old version of your best friend make facial expressions that were kind of reminiscent of ones you’d seen ten years later.

“We do have to get your shoes back,” Gansey said, casting a quick glance at her dirtied feet. Though he hadn’t really meant anything by it, Blue quickly tucked her feet under her legs and scowled at him.

Gansey really didn’t like this whole thing. It wasn’t that he had anything against children—mostly he found them interesting when presented with the opportunity to be around them, even if he wouldn’t necessarily choose to seek them out—but they were quite tiring. Their nap had only been about an hour long at most, he thought, and he could have quite honestly used another ten. He'd barely slept the night before, though it wasn't like that was anything out of the ordinary.

Unfortunately, when Ronan Lynch got his mind set on something there was no talking him out of it, whether he was five or seventeen years old.

“Okay, Ronan, how about we go and try to find the magic pond?” he tried. 

Ronan narrowed his eyes at him. “What’s that?”

“It’s a special pond in this forest that will help us get the mud off,” Gansey said. They hadn’t seen a pond earlier when walking around, but he was hopeful that Cabeswater would realize how dirty they all were and help them out.

“That doesn’t sound very magical,” Ronan pointed out.

“…it also changes colors,” he added.

Ronan paused, clearly thinking this one through for a minute. “Okay! Let’s go!”

And with that, he was off like a bottle rocket, sprinting out of the cave.

“Good lord,” Gansey moaned, looking to the cave’s ceiling. He was never going to have children if they ran away this much.

 

*****

 

Mini-Ronan was more or less what Adam expected him to be. He was loud, wild, and highly annoying. More or less how he regularly was then, but a helluva lot more talkative.

“That way’s north ‘cause there’s moss on that side of the tree. My dad says that moss only grows on the north side of trees. And boulders. There’s this giant boulder in the field out back from my house that me and my brother like to climb on. We climb to the top and push each other off. I’m better than him at it,” Ronan babbled on to Gansey, whose hand he hadn’t let go of for the last half hour of their walking around. Mini-Ronan was taking the whole ‘randomly lost with three strangers in the middle of a magic forest thing’ even more in stride than Blue had.

He also weirdly gravitated immediately to Gansey, once he got over the whole ‘accidental-head-knocking-thing,’ which was as hilarious to Adam and Blue as it was bewildering to Gansey. Adam suspected it was because Gansey was actually paying attention to most of the kid’s random stream-of-conscious babbling, but Gansey seemed a bit flattered by it so Adam decided not to say anything.

They’d found Blue’s shoes, and were now walking around mostly aimlessly. Blue and Gansey still seemed to be hoping that the storm had left some sort of large puddle that she could use to scrub some of the mud off of them, but Adam wasn’t too hopeful on that front. The rules of the regular world didn’t seem to apply in this little section of Cabeswater. Storms came in a heartbeat, and left without a trace. 

For his part, Ronan had forgotten entirely about the promise of a ‘magic pond,’ and just seemed to be excited to have someone listening to every thought that popped into his head.

“Do you think he’ll ever shut up?” Blue murmured under her breath to Adam, who allowed the corners of his mouth to quirk up in response. “Seriously, though,” she continued. “And I thought Gansey talked a lot.” 

Adam snorted at that and said, “I’m understanding more about their friendship than I ever have.”

“Too right,” Blue nodded.

“WHAT ARE YOU SAYING?” Ronan yelled, turning around to shoot them a questioning look.

“Er, nothing,” Adam said, feeling weirdly self-conscious under mini-Ronan’s stare, though it was far less harsh than the one regular Ronan usually gave the world at large. Mini-Ronan didn’t really seem to like him much. To be fair, the only one he really seemed to like so far is Gansey, but Adam couldn’t seem to take it as anything less than a personal condemnation that so far the two kid-versions of his closest friends had been openly distrustful of him.

“I know you’re lying,” mini-Ronan said. “You shouldn’t lie. My dad says that if you lie you’ll get a stiff neck.”

“That’s not true,” Adam said absently, only half paying attention to what the kid was even saying.

“Is too!” Ronan said, looking annoyed again already.

“Okay,” Adam said because it was easier to just appease the kid than it was to fight with him.

“IT IS TRUE!” Ronan yelled, probably just because he liked to be contrary.

“I believe you,” Adam said, holding up his hands in mock-surrender. 

“You don’t,” Ronan insisted.

“I do.”

“Don’t.” 

“Do!”

“Adam,” Blue cut in, “Ix-nay on the arguing-nay with a five year old…nay.”

Adam frowned at her more for not understanding pig Latin than for telling him to quit it, but he didn’t say anything else.

“That’s not how you speak pig latin,” mini-Ronan told her archly, and Adam smirked.

Blue knew better than to engage with him, though, so she just smiled wanly in response and stayed quiet. 

“Hey, keep telling me about the forest spirit thing,” Gansey said, smartly drawing Ronan back into conversation.

Blue pulled Adam back a bit so that they’re mostly out of hearing range and muttered, “what a little shit. At least I was a cute kid.”

“You were definitely also a little shit though,” Adam contended, and Blue just shot him a grin. They were both quiet for a second, and then Adam added, “Kids hate me,” because at this point it was obvious, and if he didn't point it out then the others would think he might've actually cared.

Blue laughed out loud at that. “Adam, kids don’t hate you. Kid-Ronan is just…a bit flummoxed by you, but that’s not hatred. And plus, you just pointed out kid-him is still an asshole.” 

It wasn't  terribly reassuring, honestly.

“Kid-you didn’t seem too fond of me either,” he pointed out, and Blue frowned like she was trying to remember. He doesn’t want to say ‘ _I made you run away just by stepping towards you,’_ because that sounded a little like he’d gotten a bit pathological about the whole thing.

“Well see how you react when you’re zapped back to five with three strangers in a forest,” she said, and then added. “God I can’t wait to see what you were like as a kid. But I’m betting you were more or less the same.”

He felt the same slightly queasy feeling in his stomach that had first shown up when Ronan had shrunk to pint-size. _Maybe it will stop before it gets to me,_ he reminded himself. _Maybe this was just a fluke_. 

It wasn’t necessarily that he didn’t want the others to see what he’d been like at age five. Undoubtedly it would be embarrassing, but beyond that he just didn’t quite know. He couldn’t really discern in his memories what he’d been like when he was that young. All of his childhood memories sort of bled together. He didn’t have any pictures or home videos to reinforce them in his mind, and it wasn’t like he’d ever reminisced about them with anyone, so it was all a blur. It was weird how all of his memories of home had become hazy once he’d finally left.

He couldn’t imagine that he’d say anything as a five year old that would come across as particularly illuminating to the others. They knew enough about him. It just made him uneasy to think that it would be completely out of his control.

He tried reaching out to Cabeswater again, which he’d mostly given up on after Blue ran away from them. It just wasn’t there. Well, it was there. They were in it, currently, walking around. But it wasn’t _there_ in his mind the way it usually was. 

 _What’s happening?_ he tried to ask, knowing he’d receive no answer. _Stop doing this, and let us go._

“LAST ONE TO THIS TREE IS A ROTTEN EGG!” Ronan yelled then, gesturing towards a tree that was exactly two steps to his left. He quickly closed the distance with Gansey and looked back at Adam and Blue triumphantly. “LOOKS LIKE YOU TWO ARE THE ROTTEN EGGS!”

Adam was suddenly very glad that he hadn’t had that many friends in school when he was younger. Kids fucking sucked.

**Author's Note:**

> Adam and Gansey are next! Next chapter is probably going to be longer also because of plot-related events happening.


End file.
